Cool Tools!

It's been a while since the library blog showed off a few cool tools to make your online life a bit easier, so it seems like high time to take a look at some of the new things out there!

Printing!

Printing problems may be one of the biggest headaches to come along with all of the wonderful things available on the web. How many times have you tried to print a web page and discovered that it refused to print correctly? The text was cut off. Advertising or images on the page made what should be a simple 1 page print job into a several page nightmare. If this sounds familiar then you'll be happy to find PrintWhatYouLike.com, a site that let's you take any web site and edit out those parts you don't care about and preserve the parts you do, making printing tidy and neat and efficient. Of all of the tools I've discovered in the last six months, this is by far my favorite.

Another set of problems involving printing arises in relation to PDFs. PDFs are Portable Document Format files -- the ones that look exactly like scanned in document originals. But more than ever before, new online tools let you manipulate PDF files in interesting ways, converting things (including entire web pages) to and from the PDF format. Enabling editing within PDF documents. A great site to explore these options is NitroPDF.com's collection of free online tools. NitroPDF is working to become a viable competitor for Adobe and so is garnering name recognition for its software by letting users sample limited versions of its products for free. These include converters (HTML and Word), creators and editors. The links are all for the online versions that do not require downloads. They also have free trial versions, but you do not need to download a trial to take advantage of the free software.

It's Just Easier!

PageZipper is one of those tools that just makes life easier. Why am I not surprised that it's brought to you by those clever folks who created PrintWhatYouLike? PageZipper will bind together pages that are in a series, like a bunch of photos or a sequence of Best Sites of 2008 or whatever that require you to click between each page. Instead of clicking the app simply stacks the pages vertically as you scroll. As long as you keep scrolling it continues to stack until either you stop or the sequence ends. At LOLCats you might scroll until you crashed you computer...

Another "it's just easier" tool is NameChk. This website will run your preferred user name through a massive collection of social networking, bookmarking or online tool sites to see if it is still available. That way you can run out and secure RicketyRockhopper before anyone else snags it (still available on all but Squidoo and Vimeo).

It's Just Less Annoying!

Don't invite spam to your mailbox. Rather than posting your email address, any of them, on a Facebook page, internet forum, web site, etc. you can instead use a nifty tool called Scr.im, which will assign you a short, convenient web address that will intervene between you and email address harvesters. For similar reasons, on those occasions you absolutely do have to use an email address and don't want to be bothered with the subsequent email, create an email account just for that purpose.

It's Just More Secure!

Have your own laptop or wireless device you'd like to protect in case it gets stolen? You can download the Adeona program and it will simply sit on your machine and wait, doing nothing unless you activate it. But if your machine is swiped and someone logs in to the internet using it, and you've activated Adeona in the meantime, the program will send location information that authorities can use in locating the device. (Note: this is a research program, which explains why it is free, but it is also in development so you should expect some imperfections.)